Democracy at work in quartet business

Kazuhide Isomura may be the father of what critics call the best string quartet in the world, but he has made a habit of puncturing the hype as neatly as a pin into a balloon.

The violist refers offhandedly to the chamber music scene as "the quartet business". He says he often feels like he is married to three men, the trio of colleagues that completes Tokyo String Quartet. After an absence of 22 years from Australia, the quartet will tonight take to the stage at the Opera House, performing works by Dvorak and Schubert.

Isomura, the group's founder, is loquacious, charming and prone to wild conversational fluctuations that swing from the chamber music canon and the politics of the classical music scene, to the rank injustice of having to pay full fare on flights for the group's Stradivarius instruments.

He is modest when the topic of the quartet's reputation is raised, even though the ensemble inspires the kind of breathless superlatives that other companies could only dream of.

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Isomura quietly tells the story of how this four-man phenomenon came into being. Driven by his lifelong passion for the string quartet repertoire, he set up the ensemble in 1969 with an informal philosophy of subsuming egos in the interests of the group.

He believes that the secret of the quartet's consistency is this insistence on the primacy of the group, rather than the personalities and passions of its members.

When the two newest members, violinist Martin Beaver and cellist Clive Greensmith, joined Isomura and violinist Kikuei Ikeda in recent years, the distinctive technical merits of the quartet remained unchanged - something that intrigues musical scholars and critics who marvel over the stability of the group's professional standards.

"It's not really a secret," says Isomura. "I think the main thing is that we make music in a democratic way. We express music in one voice.

"It's also lucky that we all have a similar approach to string quartet playing, in that we have great respect for the repertoire and the composers, and we are democratic in the way we play."

Isomura insists that the absence - or at least the taming - of ego is another critical factor. He feels that the dynamics of string quartet playing demand that the four instruments blend seamlessly, with no one taking the lead or hogging the spotlight.

"Of course, we all have self-respect, our own musical personalities," he says wryly. "But in the quartet business, a strong ego is not necessarily a good thing."

Given the company's strong Japanese traditions, did the introduction of Beaver and Greensmith cause any cultural difficulties in its approach to performing? Isomura gives this deep thought.

"You know, when we first started playing years ago," he says, "people would always say how consistent we were as musicians, how technically good we were - like excellent Japanese products, like a Honda. I did not like this at all."

He pauses, then laughs at the whole business of stereotypes. "I think there are no differences between Asian and Western classical music performers. Only differences in music person- alities. These are much bigger than nationality."